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Monday, January 28, 2013

It's in my blood

Hitman: Absolution has a scoring system that I think is new to the series. Achieving a high score means not just getting the target, it means getting to the target without being seen after collection all of the evidence scattered about the level and killing the target up close and personal. It also takes a peek at your friends list and shows you the best score of anyone you know who played it along with the average US and international scores. This was frighteningly informative. I have some scary mother fuckers on my friends list with level scores two to three times the average. It was also interesting that the US score was always slightly lower than the international average. There is a joke to be made there about 'gun culture' that I am going to avoid.

So no one shoots me.

This scoring system also penalizes the player for doing non-Hitman-esque things. Killing civilians is frowned upon, as well as killing non-targets and not hiding their bodies. A full on fire fight is a great way to end up with a negative score for the whole level. How much I cared about this mechanic decreased as I got closer to the end. This is not surprising as my 47 acted more like Marcus Fenix by the time I was done with him. One the final levels has The Agency taking over an entire town in an attempt to catch 47. I had just about had enough of the game, so when I found an excellent camping spot filled with both a sniper rifle and a fair amount of ammunition I settled in for some sniper style carnage.

My final score for that level for somewhere around -10,000 and it was the most fun I got out of the game.

It just wasn't for me. The 'each level is a puzzle' bit got old quickly because I hate replaying things that I have already done. Perhaps I will catch a Lets Play of the game to see how it was supposed to have been done. There are some levels that I cannot imagine getting through without a trail of corpses giving away my position, but I that is only because I did not have the skill of patience to find them.

...

I am embarrassed to say that I am enjoying Anarchy Reigns. It is nothing more than a brawler, but it is just deep enough to apply fighting game exploits to. To be specific: tick throws. A tick throw in Street Fighter is a throw follow up to a blocked quick attack, usually a jab or perhaps cross up. Not impossible to counter, but difficult to react to. Human size bosses in Anarchy Reigns tend to block a lot, and I found that if I cut my attack string short and threw for the last hit they fell for it every time. Throws would also pull them out of a dodge or dash. The last two bosses were block - block - throw over and over.

Somewhere deep in the electronics of my 360 the CPU is calling me cheap and cursing my name. This means that I am doing something right.

Run, coward!

This blog, in its present form, is a way to force me to not game away all my free time every day in the only way I know how: talk about it instead. Also, I play a lot of crap; read about it here so you don't have to. And if the complaining starts to get out of hand, leave anonymous, hateful comments.